Imagine a dictator of a regime at war that has not won on the ground in a year, that does not recruit new soldiers for fear of rebellion, that threatens to arrest its officials if they resign, while the elites in the country continue to grow. are skeptical of him. In addition, his government relies on a gang of mercenaries, whose leader insults the minister of defense, the commander of the army and probably the dictator himself, writes Corriere della Sera, citing Rador.

Would you bet on the future of such a regime? Because Vladimir Putin is like that. Since last summer, it suffered only defeats and was forced to concede in Ukraine, and the Russian offensive on Bakhmut actually failed, despite the huge cost of human lives, military equipment and destruction.

As for the new mobilization, which was prepared for months, it continues to be postponed, as the Kremlin fears waves of public hostility to the war and to Putin himself. Meanwhile, it turned out that the military put into service armored vehicles of the 1950s for lack of something better.

Against this background, minor frictions have arisen in the Russian government in recent weeks. At the end of March, someone eavesdropped on two oligarchs loyal to the regime, Yosyp Prigozhin and Farkhad Akhmedov, and released the contents of their conversations. They claim that the current leadership of Russia consists of “stupid cockroaches” who are “dragging the country down” and “destroying the future.”

It is interesting that nothing happened to the two: they did not fly out of the window, they were not poisoned and they were not detained. The regime has pretended to believe the record is fake, perhaps because it lacks the energy at this stage to begin a “purge” among the elites.

The Kremlin also notes that Russian oligarchs remain passively loyal, but do not share Putin’s imperial mirage.

Billionaires like Oleksii Mordashov from Severstal or Mykhailo Fridman from Alfa Bank continue to cooperate with the regime and its military-industrial apparatus, participating to the end, but only for the sake of opportunism and money. They would stop the war tomorrow if they could, because it hurts their interests, and that is exactly what they are implying to their Western interlocutors.

Now, the cynicism about Putin in the Russian elite is so evident that the United States is beginning to think about how to undermine the relationship between the dictator and his oligarchs.

One of the proposals currently under consideration concerns sanctions: they could be suspended in favor of the oligarchs, who advocate the withdrawal of troops and the transfer of 75% of their frozen assets to Ukraine.

Even this will probably not be enough to change the balance, but in Moscow, the seizure of power looks less secure than it did a year ago.

It emerged this week that senior officials, FSB intelligence officers and even two regional governors had been threatened with arrest if they resigned: hardly confrontational when the regime has to secure its loyalty by these means.

Finally, the most grandiose case of Yevgeny Prigozhin (the namesake, not a relative of the captured oligarch) broke out. The founder of the Wagner Group, an illegal militia blockading the city of Bakhmut, publicly insulted and called Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Army Commander-in-Chief Valery Gerasimov incompetent. Again, no one responded.

In this way, Prigozhin seemed to raise the bar: “How to win the war,” he asked himself in Telegram, “when it turns out that grandfather is a complete idiot?”. Sergey Radchenko, a Russian-British historian and political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has no doubts about the joke: “grandfather,” he notes, is the term the opposition calls Putin; Prigozhin later denied that he meant his president.

And here the complete lack of reaction from the Kremlin, which continues to need Wagner’s group, is noteworthy. “We are observing the disorganization of the armed forces, at a time of danger, which shows how something is deeply wrong in the state,” Radchenko notes. “From the outside, we don’t know what is happening, but we see smoke: there are symptoms of general malaise and signs of destabilization of the picture.”

In fact, not all observers agree. Dmytro Alperovitsy from the Washington think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator was the first to predict aggression against Ukraine in 2021. Now he believes that Putin’s power remains strong.

“The development of disagreements between collaborators is typical of a dictator. But there are no signs that the security services or the army are against him: his position is secure, and the Kremlin is betting today on a long war, which it hopes will tire Western countries sooner or later,” Alperovitzi said.

But even Alperovici does not rule out what he calls a “black swan”: a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the coming months that would separate Crimea from the rest of the Russian occupation. Because a dictator who gains prestige through the use of force may lose it when the use of force ends up degrading him, reports Corriere della Sera (Rador).